Current African city region food systems fail to deliver food and nutrition security (FNS), health, and environmental sustainability. INCiTiS-FOOD develops scientifically underpinned circular agri-food technologies and practices, suitable for African cities. The context specific socio-technological use cases of INCiTiS-FOOD address the prevalent deficiency of animal sourced foods, vegetables and fruits. Hydroponics, aquaponics, and insect farming hold great promise because they require limited land, water, energy, wealth and reduce waste. Hydroponics and aquaponics infer soilless, circular vegetable and fish farming enterprises. Using an interdisciplinary approach, inclusive and scalable business models are developed for these enterprises, contributing to thriving and collaborative communities. This circular food system thinking improves FNS, delivers safe, affordable, nutritious, and healthy food, reduces waste and the environmental footprint in African cities. INCiTiS-FOOD follows a multi-actor approach for co-design and co-creation of circular agri-food innovations and business models, involving 8 city Living Labs in 6 countries from 3 African regions (East: Kenya; West: Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone; Central: Cameroon, Gabon). The project aims for its innovations and businesses to attain a technological, societal, and business readiness level of TRL-7, SRL-7, and BRL-5, respectively. INCiTiS-FOOD agri-food innovations and business models will be widely adopted because their research and innovation maturity are proven by a large-scale demonstration as part of the Cascade Fund (1,000,000). International ecosystem building is promoted by the digital INCiTiS-FOOD Platform on SmartAgriHubs.eu to support African innovation actors. In strengthening resilience, inclusiveness, and FNS, INCiTiS-FOOD guides policy transformation by adhering to the EU Taxonomy Regulation and Milan Urban Food Policy Pact. The consortium is constituted with the EU-Africa dialogue in mind.

For proGIreg three front-runner cities (Dortmund (DE); Turin (IT); Zagreb (HR))will create Living Labs in urban areas which face the challenge of post-industrial regeneration. These areas suffer from social and economic disadvantages, inequality and related crime and security problems. They lack quality greenspaces, have a negative impact on human health and wellbeing and are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Going beyond the current state-of-the-art with Green Infrastructure as a one-off state intervention, the proGIreg Living Labs will develop NBS which are citizen owned and co-developed by state, market and civil society stakeholders. Innovation will take place on the technical level through the NBS deployments, on the social level through co-designing, co-creating and co-implementing NBS with local communities and on the economic level through combining NBS with market-ready business models. Four follower cities in Eastern and Southern Europe (Cascais PT, Cluj-Napoca RO, Piraeus GR, Zenica BA) will be co-steering the research process to assure replicability and adaptability to their local context resulting in urban plans for NBS deployment. The NBS to be tested i.a. include: regenerating industrial soils biotic compounds, creating community-based urban agriculture and aquaponics and making renatured river corridors accessible for local residents. Scientific assessment and monitoring results from the Living Labs will be made available on the EU NBS platforms OPPLA and THINKNATURE and will contribute to the European reference framework for NBS. Global impact will be achieved by a training programme for cooperative planning, implementation and management of NBS. It will be provided by partners from the cities, SMEs and universities involved. Training events will be organised in cooperation with the partner ICLEI. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) will be distributed via EdX, the most renowned MOOCs platform worldwide.